About the Artist

Lawrence Fodor

Lawrence Fodor was born in 1951 in Los Angeles and started painting at an early age. He studied painting, printmaking and art history at Orange Coast College in Costa Mesa, California, received a BFA majoring in printmaking and art history and completed graduate work in painting at Otis Art Institute in Los Angeles. Fodor’s paintings are exhibited in fine art galleries and museums in the United States and he has received favorable reviews in Art News, Art in America and numerous regional publications. He was a recipient of the City of Santa Fe Mayor’s Award for Excellence in the Arts (2014) and his proposal for the exhibition Cumulous Skies; the Enduring Modernist Aesthetic in New Mexico received NEA funding for the City of Santa Fe’s Arts Commission to produce the exhibition (2013). His paintings have been included in the publication and exhibition, Speak for the Trees (2010), and have been the subject of two catalogues to accompany exhibitions at the Laguna Art Museum, Laguna Beach, California (Holding Light, 2012) and the Lannan Foundation, Santa Fe, New Mexico (Kōan Boxes, 2009). Fodor’s work is in numerous private, corporate and public collections, most notably the Lannan Foundation Collection and the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth and has been included in solo and group exhibitions at the Laguna Art Museum, the New Mexico Museum of Art and the Lannan Foundation. He currently lives and works in Los Angeles, California and Santa Fe, New Mexico.

Artist Statement

Perseus Releasing Andromeda, in studio

Historiography itself, let us already say, will not succeed in setting aside the continually derided and continually reasserted conviction that the final referent of memory remains the past, whatever the pastness of the past may signify.

— PAUL RICOEUR, MEMORY, HISTORY, FORGETTING

Drawing on the vast archive of painting and sculpture throughout the ages, each painting in this body of work begins as an investigation into the dynamics of a significant work of art – pieces that have had a profound impact on my development as a painter. Historic works of art and significant celestial events have thrilled my imagination since I was young. I have drawn in museums from paintings and sculptures all over the world and I continue to explore, investigate and dissect historic and contemporary art. I have chased a solar eclipse, watched meteor showers through the night, experienced multiple lunar eclipses and seen ancient notations of astronomically significant events on the walls of canyons and caves. I am always looking – everywhere – in an attempt to see. These seemingly disparate conversations have had a profound impact on my work, separately, for years – the melding and coalescing of these obsessions inform these paintings simultaneously.

There is a drawn and painted version of a specific notable work of art as the foundation or anchor for each painting. I may spend weeks or even a few months analyzing the composition, structure, color and space of the historic work, rendering an ‘under-painted’ version on the canvas. I am not making academic ‘reproductions’ of the paintings – rather they are translations, dissections and appropriations of sorts. I am utilizing the past to fortify my present. A number of the paintings are paired as diptychs. Both paintings start as the same appropriated historic work, side by side. I develop one as an exacting translation of the original within the signature painting style of my hand – the other, obscured, abstracted and re-contextualized. There is a dialogue in the pairings, which gives clues as to what came before, what is present and what, within my convictions, must change.

These historic works provide provenance and a literal history/memory for each canvas – from which I move forward to eclipse and re-contextualize the original piece and its conceptual theme. The paintings see an intuitive and emotional response to their historic point of departure – a transformation by means of obliteration. Using paint, various tools and my hands I rephrase the mired mythologies within the historic piece into a current context. Stopping short of what might be considered a formal ‘resolution,’ there is an unfinished and somewhat fragmented aspect to these paintings that retain the evidence of thought process and methodology – and simultaneously contradict the ‘completeness’ of each piece, or its partner. The historic source material is eclipsed, but not for merely a moment – they are obscured to reinterpret their outdated mythologies. These paintings are an invitation to exchange and expand personal narratives and investigate how they relate to each other and the world in which we live.

This exhibition is dedicated to Chuck Lyford. Chuck adventured through life to absolute maximum capacity – traversing the planet and her skies utterly confident and with gregarious vitality. He accomplished daring feats of the highest order, achieved extraordinary balance in all aspects of his life and attained paranormal success as a true hero of a human being. He accessed an ancient and atavistic code by which to exist and maneuver. He lived what he loved. He loved what he lived. He was a shaman and a calculated (and improvisational) risk taker. Because of all of this, he was a teacher by way of how he lived his life. Chuck’s impact on how I approach my work was, and will remain, profound.

News + Press

A TIRELESS HANDSun Valley Property NewsAugust 2019

In his upcoming exhibition at Friesen Gallery, Fodor explores historic paintings and sculptures from late renaissance to baroque and neoclassicism. Depicting historical, biblical, and classical subject matter Fodor’s compositions are a reconfiguration of the old ethos these images were created under, by visually reimagining them; he subverts the mythos of these paintings and obliterates them. Vivid, dream like abstractions remain with gestures and movement that embody the force from the Old Master’s hands...

For days, weeks, and often months, Santa Fe and Los Angeles-based artist Lawrence Fodor meticulously re-creates historic masterpieces. He analyzes the composition, structure, color, symbolism, and meaning of venerated artists including Rubens, Michelangelo, Ramey, and Greco-Roman sculpture. Fodor exquisitely paints two precise masterpieces as one spellbinding diptych. He then obscures one of the paintings into complete abstraction. In Fodor’s paintings the past is reconfigured, narratives are obliterated, and tragedies of the past whisper the possibilities of future transformation. . .

The Beauty in Painting: A Time After TimeSUN VALLEY PROPERTY NEWSAugust 2017 Issue

Lawrence Fodor is a man who knows no boundaries in the field of art. His bio says he began painting at 10 years old. He has a BFA from the Otis Art Institute of Los Angeles and though a good deal of his life has been spent making abstract paintings, his degree is in both paint­ing and printmaking. His talent stems from a deep and very broad arts education not so common for an abstract painter, and his career is both celebrated and extensive. . .

'ECLIPSE: OBSCURED MEMORIES' TO OPEN AUGUST 4LAWRENCE FODOR'S NEWEST BODY OF WORK01 JUNE 2017

'Historic works of art and significant celestial events have thrilled my imagination since I was quite young. I have drawn in museums from paintings and sculptures and I continue to explore, investigate and dissect historic and contemporary art. I have chased a solar eclipse, watched meteor showers through the night, experienced multiple lunar eclipses and seen ancient notations of these kinds of events on the walls of canyons and caves. I am always looking – everywhere – in an attempt to see,' says artist Lawrence Fodor. . .

While abstract art often begins with inspiration and develops spontaneously, Lawrence Fodor approaches his canvasses in a different manner, basing his paintings on historic works. Loosely connected to abstract expressionism, Fodor works in a style in which non-specific figurative components dominate his paintings. Early in his career, he spent numerous hours among great master paintings and sculptures in European museums, copying laboriously. He has long admired Peter Paul Rubens, Jean-Étienne Ramey, Michelangelo Buonarroti, Leonardo Da Vinci, Théodore Géricault, JMW Turner, the Laocöon, and ancient Greco-Roman sculptures. . .

Lawrence Fodor recounts his camping, hiking and creative journey to Chaco Culture National Historical Park in New Mexico with five other artists in May 2015. A descriptive and illustrated narrative that includes entries drawn from his journal, photographs he took and watercolors he painted on location in Chaco Canyon and the surrounding mesas. There is magic at work in Chaco Canyon.
It is enigmatic, powerful and sustained. . .

Look around a painter's studio – it will be a reflection of the painter – a mirror of the way the artist sees, hears, thinks and relates to the world and his surrounds. This collection of photographs of studio vignettes and trenchant impressions in the studio of Lawrence Fodor is accompanied by an insightful essay on the artist's work and process by Aline Brandauer and quotes by the artist. . .

Again features artworks where repetition, obsession or meditation, are key elements to the artist’s process, sometimes obvious in the resulting artwork, sometimes not. Whether what compels each is expressed as a life-long obsession with a subject, a repetitive action, or a meditative practice, the artists in this exhibition – Sol LeWitt, Agnes Martin, Lawrence Fodor, Susan York, Jorge Pardo, Chuck Close and others – repeat themes, motions, motifs and materials again and again, over and over. . .

Santa Fe-based abstract painter Lawrence Fodor has shown his process-oriented work extensively on the West Coast for nearly three decades. His most recent output was the subject of two shows in Santa Fe, one last winter at the Lannan Foundation and another this summer at Linda Durham. Both venues featured Fodor’s 'Kōan Box' series, in which the artist applies layers of oil, wax and alkyd to the surfaces of cigar boxes. At Linda Durham, over 20 of these dazzling objects were interspersed with paintings from his ongoing 'Ligature' series. . .

Lawrence Fodor’s poetic and serene installation of Kōan Boxes at the Lannan Foundation carries us beyond reason, reconnecting us to intuition, memory, emotion, sensation and mystery. Drawing on the Buddhist practice of training the mind, these small paintings push us towards a precipice where all methods of rational or linear thought no longer function. Fodor urges us to jump into empty space, into an atmosphere where we may open our minds, our pulses, our beings. . .

Lawrence Fodor knows a strange but useful secret. It’s not a very well-hidden secret; it’s more of a wisdom that anyone can grasp from a sudden intuition or a moment of derailed thought that opens a new door. Almost like a kōan. In fact, Fodor’s secret is that there is no difference between a kōan—the quirky, traditional dialogue structure of Zen practice—and a painting. The best contemporary paintings elude the rational analysis that critics and curators and the like insist on leveling. Instead, these paintings persist through intuition, through disruptions of the expected, through playfulness, through the artist’s legerdemain, just as kōans have been doing for well over 1,000 years. . .